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Monday, January 21, 2019

“He never
defended himself and he did very little complaining. He loved to quote Dr. Johnson,
who said, ‘Live merrily and trust to good letters.’”

Excellent advice,
though I’m unable to locate its source. Given that Janice Biala is quoting her
former lover, Ford Madox Ford, who valued impressions over facts and memory
over documentation, it’s hardly a surprise. It sounds like something Johnson might have said, though he indisputably did say, “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.” Biala’s brief memoir of Ford, written in 1961, is
collected in The Presence of Ford Madox
Ford: A Memorial Volume of Essays, Poems, and Memoirs (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1981), edited by Sondra J. Stang. Biala writes:

“I cannot
remember any time when Ford admitted defeat or gave in to despair. As far as he
was concerned the artist’s life was the only one work living. You do what you
like and take what you get for it and no complaints, and that is how he lived
his life.”

How
refreshing to read in our era of subsidies, grants and workshops. One recalls
Kingsley Amis’s observation in Jake’s
Thing (1978): “If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong
since the war, it’s Workshop. After Youth, that is.” Writing is a person alone in a room with the English language, to paraphrase John Berryman. Biala continues:

“It was rare
when good letters brought him in an income equal that of a street cleaner—but then
he boasted that every member of his family died poorer than he’d been when he
was born. The most important thing about Ford
was that he was an artist. He had infinite indulgence for anything human except
cruelty and stupidity. He was himself intensely human in his faults as well as
his virtues.”

[Biala (1903-2000)
was a fine painter. Go here to see her “Portrait of a Writer (Ford Madox Ford),”
painted in 1938, the year of Ford’s death.]

Sunday, January 20, 2019

“Promise,
large promise, is the soul of an advertisement. I remember a wash-ball that had
a quality truly wonderful—it gave an exquisite edge to the razor.”

The other
day I found myself singing the jingle that accompanied a commercial for Bryllcreem
in 1965, the year I turned thirteen. I watched lustra of television when I was
a kid and must have heard hundreds of such jingles over the years. What
confounds me is why I remember so many of them and what triggers their periodic
return. I feel no nostalgia for such spontaneous revivals of wasted time, nor
do they possess camp appeal. Boomers are never so tedious as when they
sentimentalize such things. I’ve always found memorization easy, and I suspect
memory has no limit, unlike a measuring cup or a sonnet. Memory is elastic. But
what I’m describing is involuntary memory. It helps, I suppose, that the words
are set to music, which is why we can easily memorize songs and poems. The fact that never in my life have I bought
Bryllcreem or any of the other products entombed in the jingles in my memory is
irrelevant. What I bought was the commercial.

The author
of the observation at the top is Dr. Johnson. He is writing on this date, Jan. 20, in 1759, in The Idler #40. It’s
remarkable that advertising was already worthy of attention from so fine a
mind:

“The true
pathos of advertisements must have sunk deep into the heart of every man that remembers
the zeal shown by the seller of the anodyne necklace, for the ease and safety
of poor teething infants, and the affection with which he warned every mother,
that she would never forgive herself, if her infant should perish without a
necklace.”

Saturday, January 19, 2019

The lines
are from Swift’s “Verses Wrote in a Lady’s Ivory Table-Book.” The object in
question is, the OED tells us, “a
notebook.”Swift
used the word in his Journal to Stella:
“He thanked me for telling him, and immediately put his name in his table-book.”
In Swift’s poem, the lady’s table-book is open for inspection, “Exposed to
every coxcomb’s eyes, / But hid with caution from the wise.” Swift’s strategy
is to mock the lady with her own words: “Here you may read (Dear Charming Saint) / Beneath (A new Receipt for Paint.)” That is,
makeup. The lady may be beautiful, but her notebook reveals her as trivial-minded as an adolescent. To
expand its meaning beyond Swift’s context, the couplet at the top might be
applied to anyone who chooses to write in public without being able to write.
Does such a person have “wit”?

In The English Spirit: Essays in History and
Literature (1945), A.L. Rowse includes “Jonathan Swift.” He states the
obvious – that Gulliver’s Travels is
the only book by Swift that “the world has chosen.” For most readers, he remains
a one-book author, which is a shame because Swift is brilliant throughout his work, in prose and verse. Once again, Rowse states what ought to be self-evident: “The
poetry of Swift is, it would appear, an esoteric taste. There is hardly anyone
who in our literary history, so far as I can call to mind, who had a liking for
Swift’s poetry.” He names Yeats as an exception, and explains that the indifference
to Swift’s verse may be explained by “the dominance of the romantic tradition
in our literature.” This makes sense. If Shelley or Emerson is your idea of
great poetry, you’re unlikely to appreciate “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” Rowse
makes an admirable defense of Swift:

“There is so
much in his poetry that should appeal tothis age: the uncompromising intellectualism of his attitude to his
experience, its essential hardness, realism, absence of illusions, its force,
clarity and candour, its complete self-consciousness. There is no reason why
his poetry should be an esoteric taste, except that the romantic tradition
formed an idea of what poetry should be, an extremely rarefied and confined one,
excluding much of our experience, and imposing that view upon the rich and
natural variety of the subject matter of poetry.”

Things have
changed somewhat, at least in the margins, though romanticism remains contagious. J.V. Cunningham and Louise Bogan,
both of Irish descent, learned from Swift and wrote poems about him. He’s everywhere
in Joyce and Beckett. Turner Cassity, master of the couplet, may be Swift reborn,
and I detect the Irishman's ghost among the better contemporary writers of light verse,
which is often quite dark.

Friday, January 18, 2019

“[I]f you
read Mr. Beerbohm at his best you receive a certain stimulation and, if you
follow him, you will be lead up to a point of view, which will enable you
subsequently to be less subject to being overawed by solemn humbug.”

That’s as
succinct a description of Max Beerbohm’s charm as I have encountered, though the
source is somewhat unlikely. Ford Madox Ford was a deft writer of prose and a
shrewd critic, but one wouldn’t expect the arch-Modernist to praise the arch-late-Victorian
ironist, who was Ford’s senior by only sixteen months. Ford nominally reviews Beerbohm’s
Seven Men and W.H. Hudson’s Birds in Town and Village in the November
6, 1919 issue of the Piccadilly Review (collected
in Critical Essays, Carcanet, 2002). I
say “nominally” because the review, titled “The Serious Books,” tells us almost
nothing about the books in question. The “lede,” as the boys in the press room like
to say, is buried. In the review’s four pages, Beerbohm is mentioned by name
three times, and Seven Men not at
all. Hudson gets the same treatment. Ford, I suspect, perhaps in homage to
Beerbohm, is spoofing the form.

Ford starts
with and never quite recovers from a lengthy digression about his late friend
Arthur Marwood who, in a few years, would serve as a model for Christopher Tietjens
in the Parade’s End tetralogy
(1924-28). Marwood maintained, he tells us, “that for any proper man there
could only be four books in the English language that could be worth reading.”
This is the sort of outrage I would lay down as a drunken undergraduate, just
to watch the ears steam, though secretly I sort of believed what I was saying. “Two
of these four he was dogmatic about”: Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion and Ancient Law by Sir Henry James Sumner Maine. Now Ford gets to the
theme expressed in his title:

“Gentlemen
with no literary gifts, with no love of literature, and with no literary
insight – though this tendency is mostly Teutonic – produce lives of Keats,
Shelley, Browning, Crabbe, George Darley, Donne, in the hope of obtaining the
fame that descends upon the erudite, of the rewards that are reserved for the
persistently dull. These are the most pernicious of all writers of serious
books – but there are an enormous number of others.”

Ford is just
warming up. He’s already at the halfway point, and still no mention of Beerbohm
or Hudson. Here’s the “nut graf,” to revert again to journalistic lingo:

“As written
today, then, the Serious Book is generally Teutonic in its origin – that is to
say, it is produced by gentlemen more distinguished for their industry than for
their gifts, insight, or love of their subjects. That a serious book should
possess form, imaginative insight, or interest for anyone not a specialist,
would, generally speaking, be considered a very unsound proposition. To say
that its writing should be distinguished by the quality of style, would be universally
condemned.”

As to
Beerbohm, Ford calls him “the last survivor of the English school of essayists,”
which was certainly true as of 1919. To read Beerbohm is, he says, “to acquire
little or no factual instruction,” and that, of course, is one of the reasons
we read him.

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Both amateur and professional ought to be words of commendation, and the distinction
should not always be rooted in money. The former has been claimed by snobbery
and is applied with contempt. The OED
confirms that the word has come to be used “disparagingly” to describe a “dabbler,
or superficial student or worker.” I prefer the word’s etymological sense –
doing something out of love for it. In Chap. 4 of Robert Browning(1903), G.K. Chesterton writes of how Browning’s poems
on painting – “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto,”“Pictor Ignotus” – “do not
merely deal with painting; they smell of paint.” Browning was no painter but
the art for him was not “a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops
continually growing in a busy and exciting silence.” In short, Browning, when
it came to painting, was an amateur:

“The word
amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of
tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this
peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of
these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. A man must love a
thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money,
but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love
the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.”

There’s
nothing wrong with being paid for what one loves, so long as there is nothing
wrong with doing it without financial recompense, out of love. Professional originally referred to a
profession or vow made when one entered a holy order. Centuries later it became
associated with payment, yet another “oddity of language.” In Chap. 2 of his Autobiography, Chesterton again plays with the words. By profession,
his father was a real estate agent, though he had considered becoming an artist
when he was young. However, as hobbies he enjoyed painting, taking photographs
and making stained-glass windows. His son writes: “On the whole, I am glad that
he was never a professional artist. It might have stood in his way of becoming
an amateur. It might have spoilt his career—his private career.”

As with amateur, professional has mutated over the centuries. Today, the OED recognizes a newer meaning as an
adjective: “has or displays the skill, knowledge, experience, standards, or
expertise of a professional; competent, efficient.” We say, “He’s a pro,” meaning
he gets the job done. You can rely on him. The ideal is to be a professional
amateur, or vice versa.

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

All of my
sons when young went through a geology phase. I did too. My uncle was a house
painter and he once had a job in the salt mine under Whiskey Island at the
mouth of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. He brought us fist-sized chunks of rock
salt as specimens for our collection. Naturally we licked the samples like deer
at the salt lick, and the chunks lost their edges and got smaller. (I can still
taste them.) Another time, we visited relatives in western New York who lived
on a farm. The pasture behind their house was dotted with chunks of limestone
rich in fossils. We took home a bushel of them.

Why rocks? What’s
the attraction? They’re common. You find them everywhere. At first, it’s a lazy
hobby for the unambitious. There is the aesthetic angle – quartz and other
crystals. I took my oldest son to gem and mineral shows and shops, and he fell
for bismuth, a crystalline metal. Mica has its adherents, as do slate, pyrite
and chalcedony. But something more essential is involved. Rocks feel permanent.
They’re older than us, tougher and more enduring, evidence of an earlier,
pre-human Earth. Rocks are indifferent. Deborah Warren suggests some of this in
her poem “Pressure”:

“Put a
little pressure and heat on rock,

give it
time, and shale turns into slate.

It’s the
same with calcium carbonate

slowly
reinventing itself as chalk.

“Limestone’s
in no hurry; it started to harden

during the
Lower Jurassic into marble.

Graphite
spends millennia on diamond:

“The luxury
of eons.

At any rate,

slow or
slower, they move in mineral time

with plenty
of leisure for maturing late.

Nice for
them. I have a different clock,

skin-shallow.
Animals can’t afford to wait.”

Our timeline
is brief and accelerated. In his poem “In Praise of Limestone,” Auden calls us “the
inconstant ones.” We can’t compete with rocks, though even they are impermanent,
if you think geologically.

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

I love the
tartness of Elizabeth Bowen’s sentences: “When a writer has been brought to a
halt by death, one kind of activity in him has to replace another: he can no
longer cover more ground, like a tractor; he has to work upon us with a static
persistence, like an electric drill.” Perhaps it’s her Irishness or her
conviction that writing is best thought of as another species of work.
Precision counts. So do dedication and a sort of ameliorated perfectionism. You
can’t be sloppy or self-indulgent. That’s how people get hurt or disappointed,
and you don’t want to hurt or disappoint your readers. The sentence quoted above is
from Bowen’s 1936 review of Edward Crankshaw’s Joseph Conrad: Some Aspects of the Art of the Novel, collected in
her Collected Impressions (1950). Conrad had been dead for twelve years and
his reputation was in danger of fading:

“[H]is books
come under the shadow of mortality and, if they are to live, have to reinstate
themselves with us. To live, they must be either classics or curiosities—and curiosities
have not much life. Their particular, personal element tells, for a time,
against them—possibly we are more estranged from the lately dead than we know—they
have to stand on their general, major qualities. The entertainer has now to
become a monument, outside our own variations of taste and fancy. If his books
are to outlive him, we expect them to outlive us.”

Bowen isn’t
afraid to state the obvious: “Only perversity or smallness of spirit could deny
Conrad’s stature.”

I remembered
Bowen’s review after Dana Gioia told me he is reading Nostromo, Conrad’s greatest novel, the one I most often reread: “I’ve
been saving the book for years,” he says. “I’ve read everything else by Conrad.
The novel is even better than I had hoped. It is so good to read an
honest-to-God masterpiece.”